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Fun Way to Send Attachments in Mail

If you're working in a file that you want to attach to a message in Apple Mail, you can transfer the file to Mail easily: From the title bar of the file's window, drag the little proxy icon to Mail's icon on the Dock. Your Mac will make Mail the active application and open a new outgoing message, with the file attached.

ScanSnap Sponsoring TidBITS

We’re pleased to welcome as our latest long-term TidBITS sponsor Fujitsu, makers of the ScanSnap family of document scanners for home and small business use. They have been stalwarts in the Macintosh world for years, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the ScanSnap was a key piece in Joe Kissell’s efforts to eliminate (or at least significantly reduce) paper in his life, leading to the publication of “Take Control of Your Paperless Office.”

The ScanSnap line starts with the $199 ScanSnap S1100, a diminutive portable scanner powered by a USB cable and capable of single-sided scanning at 8 pages per minute (ppm). For double-sided scanning, a 10-sheet automatic document feeder, and faster performance in a slightly larger and heavier package, there’s the $295 S1300, which is what Tonya chose last year when she finally buckled under the barrage of school papers and forms (see “Dragging School Papers into the 21st Century with a ScanSnap,” 30 September 2011). And for heavier-duty use
there’s the $495 S1500M, a full-fledged desktop scanner that has a 50-sheet automatic document feeder, scans in duplex at 20 ppm, and has the most complete software bundle of the three.

Speaking of software, all three scanners come with ScanSnap Manager and Cardiris 3.6 for scanning business cards and ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap for optical character recognition, and the S1500M adds Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional.

Thanks to their longstanding presence, the ScanSnap scanners have broad third-party software support, so you can scan directly into Evernote, SugarSync, Salesforce Chatter, and Google Docs. The ScanSnap scanners can’t yet communicate directly with an iOS device; to accomplish this task, Fujitsu has released the free ScanSnap Connect iOS app that enables you to move scanned documents and images from a Mac or PC to an iOS device.

Thanks to Fujitsu for their support of TidBITS and the Apple community!

Check out the Take Control ebooks that expand on the topic in this article:

Put your paper online and keep it there with help from Joe Kissell! Assess your situation, develop a strategy, and learn clever techniques for keeping more paper at bay—with an emphasis on the Mac-compatible hardware, software, and processes needed to get the job done.

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Signing is now easier, you can view the OCR text layer, and more.
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Hard to say, given that it hasn't yet been released and it's entirely unclear what it actually does (from the video, I think large robots are involved :-)). But I'll be sure to pass it on to my contacts at Fujitsu.

I own three Scansnap scanners at three locations, three different models, bought over the last 4 - 5 years.

Installing the SW and getting upgrades for the latest Mac OS X has always been painful. The worst was that Fujitsu tried to extort additional money from Apple users even though the hardware is the same as the cheaper Windows scanner. It is their software that deliberately does you in.

I hope you will be able to influence Fujitsu to behave better from now on; otherwise you should walk away from that sponsorship.

Here you find a description of part of the problem and how to work around: http://techenvy.com/hack/mac-osx-drivers-for-windows-scansnap

Obviously, large companies are hard to influence, especially from the outside, but I can promise that I'll make sure someone from the ScanSnap division sees this.

I will note that, again like many large corporations, things can also get lost in the shuffle, so I recently helped one ScanSnap user who had an older model and thought there were no drivers for 10.6 or 10.7 based on an out-of-date Web page. But there was another Web page, it turns out, not too hard to find, that provided download links for updated drivers that worked fine. The old page simply hadn't been updated or deleted.